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View Full Version : 'Cloud' particles, broken by deformers?

dangermouse
01-22-2008, 05:47 AM
Howdy all. I've been working on some nice high pressure venting steam, and I've got it looking perfect. Jet of steam comes out of the emitter, swirls a bit, and dissipates.

In order to get the steam to fade in (hot steam is more transparent) and back out, I've plugged a ramp into the cloud shader's "Life Transparency", which works just perfect.

Perfect that is until I apply a flare deformer to my particle. The flare is to make the emitted particles tighter to emphasize the "high pressure". In the Hypergraph Connections window, I can see that the deformer is adding a whole bunch of nodes to my particle, in particular "particleShape1Deformed", and suddenly my particle cloud shader loses all bearing on the age of the particles. This happens with ANY deformer it seems.

With the deformer applied, no matter how I set up the transparency ramp, or ANY age based ramp for that matter, the results are wildly unpredictable, but usually results in the first one or frames of the particles life rendering, but not the rest.

Also, when I remove the deformer, the "particleShape1Deformed" STAYS, and I can't seem to get my particle back to it's happy old self. Annoying, but an old save fixed that problem.

Any ideas? I genuinely want cloud particles, but i'm pretty close to trying to rework it using sprites *sigh*. I can attach pics later if what I've said makes no sense.

Thanks!

P.S: Maya 2008 is my weapon of choice
dangermouse
01-23-2008, 06:54 AM
Update:

I plugged a Particle Sampler node into the transparency attribute of the cloud shader, but again, it works fine BEFORE I apply the deformer, but once I add the deformer, and hence the ParticleShape1Deformed node that appears with it, all of my Particle Sampler nodes outputs seems to break...

Argh!!
dangermouse
01-23-2008, 09:50 AM
In closing:

After trying everything else I could think of, the Particle Sampler as said before, using methods unrelated to the Particle Cloud shader like radiusPP on the particle shape itself, I gave up on the deformers altogether, too much of a headache, they broke everything I tried.

Instead I turned to fields and did my effect instead using a couple of dynamic Volume Axis fields. Came out about 90% as good as I'd hoped so I'm generally happy.

But if anyone can shed ANY light on why using deformers with particles is so unpredictable, I'd love to hear it!
optimus008
01-23-2008, 12:19 PM
The only thing that I could think of is that well particle are just points in 3D space. So if you add a deformer to the particle. it's deforming all of the particle being emitted not indivisual particle. which you are trying to acheive, the deformer is seeing all of them as one object to deform.

That's the only think I can think of, but who knows I could be way off.
DrYo
01-23-2008, 07:16 PM
As far as I know, Deformers were never intended to be used with particles. Deformers are intended for surface geometry. Use Fields instead when working with dynamics such as particles... a Volume Axis field with proper settings will do the flare effect you're looking for.
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